Junior Research Fellow in Politics
St. John’s College, University of Oxford

Female genital cutting (FGC, also known as female circumcision, clitoridectomy,
infibulation, or female genital mutilation) is a painful and dangerous
practice whereby part or all of the female child’s external genitalia
are cut away. It affects about a 130 million women in 28 African countries
today, and is one of the world’s major public health problems.
Rather than diminishing with modernization, FGC instead has been expanding.
Legal prohibition has consistently failed, but so also has noncoercive
education about the many severe health consequences of FGC. However,
it is plain now how to end FGC. The way to end FGC was invented, reinvented
actually, by women in Africa themselves. This discovery should be publicized,
developed, and adapted to local conditions across Africa.

This bewildering practice is nearly universal within the groups where
it is found, has persisted for many centuries, and in some areas is
becoming more widespread and extreme. One local woman said it will take
300 years to bring it to an end, and the casual observer would likely
agree that it would take a very long time to erode such a fundamental
cultural trait. However, it turns out that within an intramarrying group,
if FGC ends, it will only end suddenly and universally. Furthermore,
without the right sort of reform program, FGC will never end, regardless
of the degree of economic development or cultural internationalization.
Fortunately, the way to end FGC is almost as simple as the formation
of associations whose members pledge to abandon the practice.

Why do I say that FGC must either persist indefinitely or end rapidly?
Before proceeding with an explanation, first we have to listen to what
the people who do FGC say about it. They say that FGC is required for
a proper marriage, for the virtue of the woman, for the honor of her
family. Moreover, most, until recently, would be unaware that other
peoples do not do FGC, and would think that the only people who do not
do FGC are unfaithful women or indecent people. Like other outsiders
I find FGC horrifying to imagine, but for an insider FGC is more like
dentistry than it is like violence. Americans subject their children
to painful and frankly exotic dentistry practices, and not to provide
dental care to one’s child is to damage his or her chances in
life and marriage. Imagine that some foreigners come along who claim
that dentistry is dangerous and leads to fatal diseases in middle life.
We would find it very difficult to believe that there is a danger, and
after we independently confirmed the information we would find it difficult
to give up pretty teeth for our children if other parents didn’t
give them up too.

FGC is a matter of proper marriage and family honor. An individual
in an intramarrying group that practices FGC can’t give it up
unless enough other people do too. FGC is a certain kind of convention
(for a complete exposition, see my “Ending Footbinding and Infibulation:
A Convention Account, American Sociological Review, December 1996, 61:999-1017).
To understand, imagine that there is a group that has a convention whereby
audiences (at the cinema, at plays, at recitals) stand up rather than
sit down. Sitting has been forgotten. Standing is both universal and
persistent. An outsider comes along and explains that elsewhere audiences
sit. After the shock of surprise wears off, some people begin to think
that sitting might be better, but it would be better only if enough
other people sit at the same time. If only one person sits, she doesn’t
get to see anything on the stage. If only one family abandons FGC, their
daughter doesn’t get married, because only unfaithful women lack
FGC. However, if a critical mass of people in the audience can be organized
to sit, they realize that they can attain both the ease of sitting and
a clear enough view of the stage. This critical mass then has incentives
to recruit the rest of the audience to sitting. Similarly, if a critical
mass of people in an intramarrying group pledge to refrain from FGC,
then the knowledge that they are a critical mass makes it immediately
in their interest to keep their pledges, and suddenly makes it in everyone
else’s interests to join them. Without an understanding of the
underlying mechanism, the abrupt end of such an entrenched practice
by means of a mere public pledge would seem to be nearly miraculous.

A peculiar characteristic of a convention like this is that even if
each individual in the relevant group comes to think that it would be
better to abandon the practice, no one individual acting on her own
can succeed. Each person could come to think that sitting is better
than standing, but any individual sitting on her own would only make
herself worse off. Enough people have to sit at the same time. The way
to do this is to declare a public pledge that marks a convention shift.
Every family could come to think that FGC is wrong, but that is not
enough, FGC would continue because any family abandoning it on its own
would ruin the futures of its daughters. It must be abandoned by enough
families at once so that their daughters’ futures are secured.

Speculation? No. I have shown elsewhere that the convention model explains
the binding of women’s feet in China. The practice was beginning
about the age of eight to bend the toes under the feet, force the sole
to the heel, and tightly wrap the girl’s foot so that as she matured
her feet remained tiny, perhaps a mere five inches in length. Footbinding
was painful, dangerous, and disabling. Why did the Chinese do it? Again,
it was necessary for a proper marriage, for the virtue of the woman,
for the honor of her family. Footbinding and FGC are essentially equivalent
practices, and originate from similar causes, which I do not discuss
here in order to remain brief. Footbinding and FGC persist because of
the same convention mechanism. Footbinding lasted for a thousand years,
was universal among all “decent” Chinese, and was undented
by liberal agitation and imperial prohibition in the 19th century. However,
footbinding ended in less than a generation. In localities where it
did end, it ended suddenly and universally, just as the convention model
predicts. Therefore, the methods used to end footbinding in China should
work to end FGC in Africa.

The work of the antifootbinding reformers had three aspects. First,
they carried out a modern education campaign, which explained that the
rest of the world did not bind women’s feet. The discovery of
an alternative is necessary but not sufficient for change. Second, they
explained the advantages of natural feet and the disadvantages of bound
feet in Chinese cultural terms. New information about health consequences,
again, is necessary but not sufficient for change. Third, they formed
natural-foot societies, whose members publicly pledged not to bind their
daughters’ feet nor to let their sons marry women with bound feet.
The problem is that if only one family renounces footbinding their daughters
are thereby rendered unmarriageable. The pledge association solves this
problem – if enough families abandon footbinding then their children
can marry each other.

The first antifootbinding society was founded in 1874 by local missionaries
for their converts, who accidentally discovered the effectiveness of
the public pledge. This local success went unnoticed, until it was rediscovered
and advocated on a national level in 1895 by the newly founded Antifootbinding
Society in Shanghai that rapidly gained 300,000 members. The pledge
societies, and the cessation of footbinding, spread like a prairie fire.
By 1908 Chinese public opinion was decisively antifootbinding, and footbinding
of children was absent from urban populations by 1911. Other Chinese
marriage practices, such as arranged marriages and early female age
of marriage changed slowly over many decades. Notice that cultural regularities
do not all behave in the same fashion. Unlike a practice such as arranged
marriage, footbinding and FGC are each a special kind of convention
such that either nearly everyone does it or no one does it, so that
when it ends it must end quickly.

You might think that my wishful thinking has overdrawn the analogy
and that it is preposterous to believe that tactics that worked in 1898
Shanghai should work in 1998 Senegal. Not so. When I first studied the
problem I predicted that pledge associations would work to end FGC.
I did not know then that some women of Malicounda Bambara, a village
of 3,000 in Senegal, were reinventing the techniques of the antifootbinding
reformers. After participating in a two year basic active education
program developed by Tostan, a nongovernmental organization working
in collaboration with UNICEF and the Government of Senegal, the women
persuaded the various elements of their community that FGC should end.
In September 1996, the village pledged to refrain from FGC, an event
known as “the Malicounda Commitment.” A year later, after
the traditional season for performing FGC had passed, no cuttings had
been performed in the village. The Malicounda women discussed their
decision with other Tostan participants in the villages of Ngerin Bambara
and Ker Simbara. The people of Ngerin Bambara decided on their own to
make a similar pledge in November 1997. The people of Ker Simbara decided
that they could not stop FGC without consulting the rest of their extended
family living in ten villages (consistent with the nature of FGC as
a practice conventional within an intramarrying group). Two of the men
went from village to village discussing the issues. Then, “After
weeks of bitter argument, the villagers gathered in February [1998],
and vowed never again to circumcise their girls. A centuries-old tradition
was dead within minutes” (Vivienne Walt, “Village to Village:
Circumcising a Ritual,” Washington Post, 7 June 1998, Outlook).
These 8,000 people in ten villages enacted the “Diabougou Declaration.”
The Clintons met with the women of Malicounda on their state visit to
Senegal in April 1998, congratulated them, and encouraged them in their
work. So far 29 Senegalese communities have declared an end to FGC,
and the movement continues to spread.

Molly Melching, director of Tostan, a literacy and skills training
program built around group discussion, whose clients have been the initiators
of the reform process, tells me that the correspondence between the
convention model and the events she is witnessing is “astonishing”
and even “eerie.” The mass abandonments appear to be so
nearly miraculous that responsible outsiders in the aid agencies and
the media are likely to judge these events to be eccentric and ephemeral
rather than as the spark that ignites a prairie fire as with the end
of footbinding in China. That is why it is worth emphasizing that the
convention model predicts and confirms the success of the process devised
and carried out by the villages in Senegal. In China, the success of
the pledge technique was discovered locally in 1874, but was not implemented
nationally for another twenty years. My wish is that the success of
the Malicounda Commitment be understood and replicated now rather than
twenty years from now.

Some qualifications are in order. The events in Senegal follow from
a larger process of emerging public deliberation in the villages, a
direct consequence of the Tostan basic education program. Tostan provides
training in personal skills, organizational skills, health, hygiene,
and human rights, but never tells people what to do. The women of Malicounda
decided on their own that ending FGC was a priority, and invented the
commitment method themselves. The other villages have learned from that
example, but have independently debated and decided the issue each on
its own. Public discussion reveals previously hidden costs of FGC, and
allows people wanting to end FGC to find one another and to carry their
message to others. FGC is ending because, after education and deliberation,
enough people want it to end. The successful pledges cannot be ripped
out of context and pasted by decree into other localities. Nothing would
be worse than coercive legislation or unsupportive pressure from the
center to form associations that pledge to end FGC. The reason is this
– the pledge technique can work beautifully, but a clumsily imposed
pledge that fails or a sham pledge would ruin the credibility of the
pledge tactic in that location for a generation or more. More generally,
unpopular legal prohibition or harsh propaganda are doomed to meet with
resistance. It’s just human nature. If some outsider tells you
that you are a bad person because of a family tradition you follow,
and you follow this tradition because you are a good person, then will
you abandon the practice and thereby confirm the outsider’s judgement
of you as a bad person? I think not.

The people who do FGC are honorable, upright, moral people who love
their children and want the best for them. That is why they do FGC,
and that is why they will decide to stop doing it, once a safe way of
stopping it is found. Since FGC will end sooner or later, it is better
that we put our efforts into ending it sooner rather than later. Let’s
study good ways of stopping it, and let the people who still do FGC
know what we and their neighbors in Africa have found out about ending
it.

The social processes that create, sustain, & potentially end practices
such as female footbinding in China & female genital mutilation (FGM)
in Africa are examined, with particular focus on the self-enforcing
convention theory developed by Thomas Schelling (1960). Under conditions
of extreme resource inequality, polygny emerges as females can successfully
raise children as the second wife of a successful man more easily
than as the first wife of a low-ranking man. However, high-ranking
men have the power to enforce extreme measures of fidelity control,
eg, footbinding or FGM, which are mimicked by lower-ranking individuals
in successive generations. Under these circumstances, eventually all
women must submit to fidelity control practices in order to achieve
marriage. However, these self-enforcing conventions cited by Schelling
can be transformed. The convention hypothesis predicts that FGM can
be terminated through mechanisms similar to those used to end footbinding:
explanation of the physiological dangers of the practice, international
condemnation of the practice, & (most importantly) associations of
parents who refuse to subject their daughters to the practice or marry
their sons to victims of the practice. 2 Figures, 64 References. Adapted
from the source document. (Copyright 1997, Sociological Abstracts,
Inc., all rights reserved.)